Wrong!

[Alorael at Large]

CSI has taught many people many things about forensics and law, and many of those things are simply not true. This is a source of immense frustration to those actually involved in criminal trials, as the evidence they present isn't as quick, as authoritative, and as neat as the public has come to expect.

 

This sort of misconception about what something is actually like affects all kinds of fields, ranging from high school stereotypes to the most esoteric reaches of academia to the most niche hobbies.

 

Set the record straight, Spiderweb. What things that you do, like, or are do you find people consistently misunderstanding, misconstruing, and misappropriating?

 

—Alorael, who thought of this while talking about science in a room full of scientists with a scattering of non-scientists. He used a paraphrase of something SoT once said about experimental science requiring high tolerance of being wrong and stupid most of the time, and many scientists nodded thoughtfully while a few laypersons looked horrified.

[Rowen]

Are you telling me that my local police station doesn't not have one of

in it? My life is a lie.

[Cairo Jim]

I've met a small hand full of people who all watch CSI, NCIS and all that crap, and think that they know how to get away with things. Highly annoying.

[Triumph]

Well, I'm a historian, so...history. There are all the specific myths, untruths, and inaccuracies that people believe, but there are also the cliches and false assumptions about history itself that people glibly toss around (e.g. that "History is written by the victors;" that we know every about the past; that we can't really know anything about the past; etc.). Bah, humbug! That's why someday, when I finish this Ph.D., I hope to become a teacher and embark upon a career of trying to fight back against the nonsense.

[Erebus the Black]

When I ask people an A or B question and they simply answer Yes or No I am constantly baffled. God damn it people, Yes what?!

 

Also there are still people who think humans have germs in our stomach that help us break food, and this is perpetuated by kids shows (such as Arthur, although in his case it might be true).

 

NG and science channel put up shows about the universe and physics where they say that (in the context of the double slit experiment) electrons are magic particles that when they are faced with a dilemma of which hole to go through they act like a wave and when looked at they act like a particle.

 

Originally Posted By: Triumph

Well, I'm a historian, so...history. There are all the specific myths, untruths, and inaccuracies that people believe, but there are also the cliches and false assumptions about history itself that people glibly toss around (e.g. that "History is written by the victors;" that we know every about the past; that we can't really know anything about the past; etc.). Bah, humbug! That's why someday, when I finish this Ph.D., I hope to become a teacher and embark upon a career of trying to fight back against the nonsense.

As an agnostic I can tell you I fell we really can't know for certainty anything about anything.

[Callie]

There are so many misconceptions presented by the entertainment industry and the media that it would be difficult to list all of them. But these things are constructed by humans and made for humans so who's really at fault? The Jefferson quote in my signature is one of my favorites and it's as relevant as ever.

 

A few examples:

Unrealistic impressions of romance, sexism, racism and all other kinds of prejudice, exaggeration and glorification of police authority and the military, inaccurate physics, false medical procedures, historical inaccuracies, improper lab procedures (but the reagent bottle isn't labelled!), dehumanization of villains (i.e. the Viet Cong in the film The Deer Hunter) and other forms of the "Us vs. Them" kind of mentality, etc., etc...

[Prince of Kitties]

Myth of the black rapist.

 

Edit: other offensive favorites of mine...

 

- "All sociopaths are brilliant and/or geniuses."

 

- "Sex is the best weapon a woman has."

[Erebus the Black]

A southpark misconception: Aspergers can be mitigated by constant and heavy alcohol drinking.

[Trenton.]

This is why I watch My little Pony. Who needs Crime? Who needs misconceptions? Its Ponies darnit >.>

 

Lauren Faust got it right

[Enraged Slith]

There are quite a few people who have decided against vaccinating their children for horrible illnesses, but I assume this has more to do with these people being horribly retarded and unfit for parenting than any sort of misinformation. They hear what they want to hear and wind up killing their children and spreading disease. God bless America and all its wonderful mavericks.

[Dikiyoba]

Watch your language, Enraged Slith. "Retarded" is a slur that contributes to the continuing stigmatization of people with mental disorders and not appropriate to use here or, indeed, anywhere.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Randomizer]

MYTH - Aluminum foil helmets protect you from alien mind control.

 

You can test the effectiveness of your helmet by taking a small AM radio, tuning it to a strong radio station, and then covering it with the helmet to see if it blocks the radio signal so you can no longer hear the station. This is how they test Faraday cages,

[Harehunter]

When I was growing in the time of Cronkite, Huntley/Brinkly and such, it was understood that the people who presented the news did so from a fair and impartial viewpoint. It was also understood that they did their best to investigate the stories in order to present the facts and avoid spreading mis-information.

 

Somewhere in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate and such, faith in our government eroded, and with it came investigative reporting. Editorialization also became more and more apparent.

 

Now we have dueling news rooms, with no pretense of masking any political bias that the news persona have. Add to that the purely editorial forums of the panels of talking heads, and the lines between journalism and editorialism fade out completely.

 

Out of all of this, the thing that peeves me the most is the shameless way these so-called journalists "edit" the story in order to make it seem that AAA was said, when in actuality ABC was said. This sort of misinformation bangs loudly on the door of outright lying, but does not actually enter. That these purveyors of spin are still thought of as true impartial journalists, most people do not question what they hear, and believe that what they are hearing is truth.

 

I myself have fallen for this subtle trap, believing one side while assuming the other side is only spin and half-truths that carry dark implications. I now have to listen carefully to both sides of each argument, in order to be able to interpolate the actual truth that lies somewhere in between. My faith in scientific studies has been thoroughly shot down as I have learned the ways that statistical analysis can be manipulated to affect the outcome.

 

The thing that disgusts me the most is how all this has served to divide us into distrustful, warring factions, when what we need is a way to unite us as a people. Racial prejudice, class warfare, political correctness and many other things are now the things that are constantly being used to divide us. I have Slarty to thank for helping me to realize my own biases, and to try to overcome them. I volunteered to put my life on the line to protect the liberties we have in this country. I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

 

That does not mean that I should abrogate my right to do likewise. I will do my best not to cause offense, but on the other hand I will still hold on to what I believe, even if that is something that someone may take offense of. For example, I am not a religious person, but I do believe in God. I do not mean that to offend anyone, but there are people who will take offense to that. To those people, I ask for their tolerance, just as I am willing to accept that they do not share my beliefs. I take no offense from those who believe there is no higher being, until they seek to restrict my right to believe and to express my belief.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Darkest retroperitoneal corners

What things that you do, like, or are do you find people consistently misunderstanding, misconstruing, and misappropriating?

I study computer science. Enough said...

[Mosquito---Slayer]

Stories about wars,

The winning side: Ye know they were twice our number but against our strength they fled like little kittens.

The losing side : Ye know they were ten times our number, but we fought till the end, if only we were more they would have fled like little kittens.

Time to time it's hard to believe that it's the same war if you hear the story from the losers , neutrals and winners.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Rowen is to Young for all this

Are you telling me that my local police station doesn't not have one of

in it? My life is a lie.

No, but only because you're not supposed to play with a Kinect while on the job.

Originally Posted By: אבדן

Also there are still people who think humans have germs in our stomach that help us break food

Since the human gut is full of bacteria and those bacteria do break down a number of polysaccharides that we can't otherwise digest, I'm going to call this one true.

Originally Posted By: Rowen is to Young for all this

Are you telling me that my local police station doesn't not have one of

in it? My life is a lie.

No, but only because you're not supposed to play with a Kinect while on the job.

Originally Posted By: אבדן

Also there are still people who think humans have germs in our stomach that help us break food

Since the human gut is full of bacteria and those bacteria do break down a number of polysaccharides that we can't otherwise digest, I'm going to call this one true.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

My faith in scientific studies has been thoroughly shot down as I have learned the ways that statistical analysis can be manipulated to affect the outcome.

I'll throw statistics and scientific studies up as things that are gotten wrong all the time, and it's a problem. You can't make the statistics say whatever you want; there's a right way and a wrong way (or several right ways and many wrong ways) to do analysis, and any good statistician can tell you when the results are manipulations and lies. But most of the public can't, so we get insanity like climate change arguments, vaccination causing autism, and too many other science in pop culture debacles.

My other pet peeve, extended a bit from science, is just about everything related to psychiatry. The brutal insane asylum, the horrors of electroconvulsive therapy, the fact that most psychotic patients are also uncontrollable and violent, the general way depression is misunderstood, and the list goes on.

—Alorael, who will point out that all the media portrayals of old state hospitals with patients/inmates shambling around like zombies and drooling are somewhat accurate. Muscle rigidity and excess saliva production really are side effects of many antipsychotics, particularly ones like the old staple thorazine. (Current drugs have reduced side effects, but they're still there.)

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

Since the human gut is full of bacteria and those bacteria do break down a number of polysaccharides that we can't otherwise digest, I'm going to call this one true.

You have just demonstrated the misconception:
On second thought you seem to have misunderstood or misread my intention. The misconception is that people think that we have germs specifically in the stomach, not the gut.
Or did I misunderstand you and by "this one true" you meant that the misconception exists?
Only the intestine has bacteria, these help humans stay healthy (and produce vit k) not break down foods, the stomach of animals that eat grass (such as cows and sheep) have bacteria in their stomachs to break down the cellulose (and there are probably other examples I am not aware of).

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

You can't make the statistics say whatever you want;

However you can make surveys say whatever you want ( I urge you to watch the first two episodes of Yes Prime minister to see what I mean)

[Alorael at Large]

Oh, yes. I misread what you said! But I've never encountered that particular misconception before, unless I also conflated stomach with gut then and thought nothing of it.

 

You can make surveys say whatever you want, but then the good analysts will point out that you made a terrible survey and it proves nothing.

 

—Alorael, who will also mutter something disparaging about social sciences. It's under his breath, though, so you can't hear it.

[Harehunter]

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

Alorael, who will also mutter something disparaging about social sciences. It's under his breath, though, so you can't hear it.

Mumble mumble mumble, ...agree..., mumble mumble.

Then let us remain
At our home on the range,
Where never is heard
A disparaging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

[Upon Mars.]

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

CSI has taught many people many things about forensics and law, and many of those things are simply not true. This is a source of immense frustration to those actually involved in criminal trials, as the evidence they present isn't as quick, as authoritative, and as neat as the public has come to expect.

People should be watching this Danish program called the Killing: it's accurate about how evidence is actually pieced together and not conjured up out of thin air. It also helps us understand that experts can't do everything at once most and that judicial affairs aren't as neatly resolved as one might think; there 's still lots of blanks, lacks of testimonies even after closing the case.

Also I have to give Two hypothesis to why people expect that law should be so quick and immediate.

1.My theatrical background provided me the first possible answer: Theater is all about stage, actors, objects and ultimately the non-existence of the stage, actors and objects, which is why theatre can be so excessive, so brutal compared to a screen, photography or a painting.

The medium of the screen, paintings and TV makes this excess of meaning (that a physical chair is not just a physical chair) impossible : it depicts reality, I even claim that it creates reality, because the object depicted is not physical so that it can be carried into your mind wherever you go, that it precisely doesn't allow you to continue the way you did before, which is the opposite of theatre where people are allowed to return to normal, that the thing which happened on stage has never really happened. So in conclusion if law is depicted as swift on the TV, even if you don't believe in it the very medium through which it has passed has presented it's self as true/real.


2. It's not the TV, it's about politics. Aren't you aware that the gradual absence of the state into the affairs of it's people, corporations etc, by taking away funds is actually reinforcing the state? Picture a political regime which blames the apathy of it's people for all the ills it has caused: obesity -people don't take care of themselves, problems with immigrants -they don't wish to integrate, disparities between the rich and the poor -the poor don't work enough and all that sh@-é. A political party needs only a strong media to focus on a issue, and and they already have a solution instead of dealing the almost colossal task of dealing with all of these problems all at once.

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

This sort of misconception about what something is actually like affects all kinds of fields, ranging from high school stereotypes to the most esoteric reaches of academia to the most niche hobbies.

Set the record straight, Spiderweb. What things that you do, like, or are do you find people consistently misunderstanding, misconstruing, and misappropriating?

Psychology. Most people believe that just because I'm a psychology student that I'm interested into analysing their profile and deducing things from their subconscious, which I don't for four main reasons:

A. It's impolite. Go manage your own hell.
B. Psychology is about ethics. Not "good healthy relationships". Just ethics.
C. It's not my department. I try to understand/analyse "the mind" not your mind.
D. I like numbers, dismantling theories and stuff. I don't "undo" other people and read them like paper strips.

Originally Posted By: The praxis of practice

—Alorael, who thought of this while talking about science in a room full of scientists with a scattering of non-scientists. He used a paraphrase of something SoT once said about experimental science requiring high tolerance of being wrong and stupid most of the time, and many scientists nodded thoughtfully while a few laypersons looked horrified.

Yeah I get a lot of that. Most people never herd about a little someone called Karl Popper.

I was even called a criminal supporter for saying that I wasn't concerned by the existence of crime and delinquency, but rather concerned and interested by the variations of crime of a specific place and time-set.

[Prince of Kitties]

Originally Posted By: "Upon Mars"

1.My theatrical background provided me the first possible answer: Theater is all about stage, actors, objects and ultimately the non-existence of the stage, actors and objects, which is why theatre can be so excessive, so brutal compared to a screen, photography or a painting.

The medium of the screen, paintings and TV makes this excess of meaning (that a physical chair is not just a physical chair) impossible : it depicts reality, I even claim that it creates reality, because the object depicted is not physical so that it can be carried into your mind wherever you go, that it precisely doesn't allow you to continue the way you did before, which is the opposite of theatre where people are allowed to return to normal, that the thing which happened on stage has never really happened. So in conclusion if law is depicted as swift on the TV, even if you don't believe in it the very medium through which it has passed has presented it's self as true/real.

IOW, theater has more impact because it forces you to imagine the setting? I suppose that makes sense, if I am understanding you correctly. I'm not sure it's universally true for everyone, though.

However, I must at this point go OT and say that I strongly dislike the phrase "creates reality." Not because it's technically wrong - "reality" includes our beliefs and behaviors and perceptions, since those are very physical properties of our bodies - but because it is extremely easy to abuse, and tends to create misunderstanding. Tell someone who isn't a philosophy major about "creating reality" and they'll think you're talking about changing the laws of physics.

(And it doesn't help IMO that some philosophy professors I've met have actually talked about exactly that - that the laws of physics are purely subjective social constructs, and can vary depending on our beliefs.)

[Prince of Kitties]

Oh, regarding mockery of social sciences. I think the social sciences are necessarily going to rely more on empirical evidence than the hard sciences, since anything involving human beings has far too many variables to account for. That doesn't mean they don't work.

 

(Actually applied social sciences have probably saved my life at a few points.)

[Upon Mars.]

Originally Posted By: Miramor

Originally Posted By: "Upon Mars"

1.My theatrical background provided me the first possible answer: Theater is all about stage, actors, objects and ultimately the non-existence of the stage, actors and objects, which is why theatre can be so excessive, so brutal compared to a screen, photography or a painting.

The medium of the screen, paintings and TV makes this excess of meaning (that a physical chair is not just a physical chair) impossible : it depicts reality, I even claim that it creates reality, because the object depicted is not physical so that it can be carried into your mind wherever you go, that it precisely doesn't allow you to continue the way you did before, which is the opposite of theatre where people are allowed to return to normal, that the thing which happened on stage has never really happened. So in conclusion if law is depicted as swift on the TV, even if you don't believe in it the very medium through which it has passed has presented it's self as true/real.

IOW, theater has more impact because it forces you to imagine the setting? I suppose that makes sense, if I am understanding you correctly. I'm not sure it's universally true for everyone, though.

However, I must at this point go OT and say that I strongly dislike the phrase "creates reality." Not because it's technically wrong - "reality" includes our beliefs and behaviors and perceptions, since those are very physical properties of our bodies - but because it is extremely easy to abuse, and tends to create misunderstanding. Tell someone who isn't a philosophy major about "creating reality" and they'll think you're talking about changing the laws of physics.

(And it doesn't help IMO that some philosophy professors I've met have actually talked about exactly that - that the laws of physics are purely subjective social constructs, and can vary depending on our beliefs.)

True the phrase is very ambiguous: it's just that I'm translating French into English (I act in French plays hence...) What I really mean is that pictures creates/recreates the tools that help us perceive reality, this what I mean by "creating reality".

Originally Posted By: Miramor

IOW, theater has more impact because it forces you to imagine the setting?

Perhaps it has a more "direct" political dimension than the screen, but in that case, if the point of theatre is to suspend social life, it may have a opposite impact of the screen/photography/painting/drawing in the sense that the point of doing theatre is to create a vacant space where anything is possible. My point is that pictures don't work the same they help define reality as we perceive it : in a painting or on your TV screen a chair is just a chair, so in a way CSI agents working in a way are just agents working "in the way they should be doing" a broad manner of speech, hence why perhaps we are confused when actual experts don't function/work in the same manner.

[Harehunter]

The problem with social sciences is that there are "far too many variables to account for". In order to arrive at a definitive conclusion, any model developed has to have so many parameters with nearly infinite cardinality, which would render it unsolvable with current computational hardware, or it must be pared down to a manageable set of parameters with smaller sample sizes that are still large enough and, hopefully, random enough to be statistically verifiable. But once you enter the realm of statistical sampling, therein lies room for error, either completely unintentional, or unconsciously from an underlying bias.

 

I am trying not to minimize the value of the social sciences, just to point out that there is a sizable margin of error in the quantification of them.

[Erebus the Black]

I just saw a movie that claimed that the only way someone can bite himself (or herself) and draw blood is if s/he's insane.

What do you think Myth or Truth?

 

(The second point was, that because love is a state of insanity people who are in love can do the above to themselves)

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

just saw a movie that claimed that the only way someone can bite himself (or herself) and draw blood is if s/he's insane.
What do you think Myth or Truth?

If people can cut, stab, and shoot themselves (with the intent to survive), then biting ought to be no problem. (Plus, people bit their tongues and such by accident hard enough to draw blood all the time, which definitely moves it into the "myth" category since it didn't make an exception for accidental bites.)

Dikiyoba.

[Lilith]

"insane" isn't a term with a proper psychological definition anyway

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Miramor

Oh, regarding mockery of social sciences. I think the social sciences are necessarily going to rely more on empirical evidence than the hard sciences, since anything involving human beings has far too many variables to account for.

I'm not sure what you mean by empirical here. Hard sciences also tend to rely heavily on collected empirical data, If you're saying social sciences rely on empirical description rather than empirical data-gathering to try to draw general conclusions, that's not science. And if you mean social science creates more empirically validated models without understanding underlying laws... maybe, but that's not really so different.

—Alorael, who has bitten his hand hard enough to draw blood. By accident, but it happened, and he's not notably insane. If the initial point is that you can't intentionally bite yourself hard enough to draw blood, that's almost certainly false. Most people won't, but you certainly could if you had strong enough incentive.

[Harehunter]

This brings to mind a quite notorious character on MASH. Does anyone remember Col Flagg?

[Kelandon]

Originally Posted By: Upon Mars.

Yeah I get a lot of that. Most people never herd about a little someone called Karl Popper.

This was a lot funnier when I read this as John Popper.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

This brings to mind a quite notorious character on MASH. Does anyone remember Col Flagg?

Which episode? The one where army intelligence is a contradiction?

[Harehunter]

That was Military Intelligence. And yes, it is often times regarded as an oxymoron. I liked the episode where Flagg and that guy, Stone, from the CIA were bumping heads investigating Burns.

[Upon Mars.]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

"insane" isn't a term with a proper psychological definition anyway

In psychiatry, sanity is possibly when someone is fully morally aware of his actions.

Originally Posted By: ξ

Originally Posted By: Upon Mars.

Yeah I get a lot of that. Most people never herd about a little someone called Karl Popper.

This was a lot funnier when I read this as John Popper.

Haha! Love it man.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Upon Mars.

In psychiatry, sanity is possibly when someone is fully morally aware of his actions.

nope! that's a legal definition, not a psychiatric one

[Upon Mars.]

Thanks for the info.

[Dantius]

Hmm. Although it's mainly died down now, 9/11 truthers seriously annoyed me back when they were a thing. I think one showed up here once a few years back, but you have to look to find them now.

 

Some of the other things that are blatantly wrong that annoy me that remain topical to this day are vaccine denial, YEC, Austrian economics, people displaying ignorance of statistics and/or basic arithmetic, historical revisionism (more specifically the whole "America is a Christian nation" thing that's showing up now, but others are guilty of this, too), and any sort of anti-science and anti-reason attitudes and ideologies in general.

 

Of course, there are other things that I view as blatantly false and a useless waste of time, but I know when to keep quiet about those, given their predilection for starting flame wars (especially here).

[Upon Mars.]

You mean Austrian School of economics? Is it not already dead yet?

 

 

As for me, although I have certain standards (I don't want to live in a society where I have to debate continuously on why rape, racism and the death penalty is wrong), I don't think that beliefs are a problem as long as people have the curiosity to go out and confront their beliefs system or values.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Upon Mars.

You mean Austrian School of economics? Is it not already dead yet?

Nnnope. It's actually experiencing a resurgence in many ways, most notably do to the effect Ron Paul is having (cf. GOP platform item about investigating a return to the gold standard, which is pretty much the Worst Economic Idea Ever).

[Soul of Wit]

1. Every member of every profession is capable of performing every task that someone else in that same profession is capable of performing.

 

2. The only way to balance a budget is to eliminate (or come close to eliminating) a single category of spending that will have this result. Ignored are possibilities like eliminating several things, or cutting several things, or cutting some things and raising taxes, or ...

 

Inflow - Outflow = Surplus (Deficit)

 

3. A government can be (or should be) run like a business. Accounting principles point out how ludicrous this idea is.

 

4. One's top priority, during an economic crisis, should be eliminating a deficit (as opposed to: keeping people employed, keeping people housed, incarcerating the felons responsible for the economic crisis, etc.)

 

5. One's top priority, during an economic crisis, should be unseating the leader of the opposing political party (as opposed to...)

[Skwish-E]

It really annoys me when people say "Poison" when they mean "Venom" or when they say "Gender" when they mean "Sex."

 

We have no poisonous snakes here. You can cook and eat any snake.

[Actaeon]

Provided you remove the venom glands.

 

(Oh, and for me, it has to be evolution. There are a whole bunch of misconceptions, many of which can be traced back to Herbert Spencer. People use "survival of the fittest" as if the definition of "fittest" wasn't wholly dependent on physical and temporal location. They talk about being "more evolved" as if all life on Earth wasn't the same age. Also, as an Anth major, I grind my teeth when someone talks about humans evolving from apes, as if we weren't apes ourselves.)

[A less presumptuous name.]

I like when people talk about the theory of evolution, and whether they believe in it. Evolution isn't a theory, it's an observation. It occurs whether you acknowledge it or not. It's not a question of belief. Darwin is known for this theory of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection being the theorized mechanism for the observable process of evolution.

[Alorael at Large]

The theory of evolution isn't simply natural selection, though. It's accepted that it includes mutation and speciation over long periods of time. That hasn't been observed because we have no way to simulate the timescales involved very well, although something like speciation can and has been observed in E. coli.

 

—Alorael, who is willing to accept the idea of being "more evolved" as long as it's in a context. For example, boto dolphin is more highly evolved for its Amazon habitat than the tucuxi, which first arrived in the river several million years later. The boto has evolved some unusual characteristics that the tucuxi (and other dolphins) lack. However, Australian fauna is more highly evolved for the Australian environment than rabbits and cane toads, and those are still outcompeting everything Australia has even though they're just about the only thing that can't kill you. (The cane toad is poisonous, not venomous, but most people don't eat toads. And the people who lick the toads really ought to know better.)

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

It's accepted that it includes mutation and speciation over long periods of time. That hasn't been observed because we have no way to simulate the timescales involved very well, although something like speciation can and has been observed in E. coli.

Hybrid speciation is bit of a special case, but we can prove it can and does happen (at least on occasion and at least in plants) because it definitely happened within recent history.

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

One of the subtlest arguments I know is the rebuttal of the old creationist complaint that natural selection is a tautology — that 'survival of the fittest' just means 'survival of the survivors'. In fact, natural selection very nearly is a tautology, and that's what makes it so inevitable. But it's not actually a tautology, and for a subtle but profound reason.

 

The point is that 'fitness' can be anything that makes for survival, but fitness also has to be something in particular, that makes for survival. It is not just an abstract quality of survivingness as such. Evolution is a theory about cause and effect, not just logical definition. It presumes that if an organism survives, it survives because of some cause. Fitness is not the survival itself, but the cause of survival — whatever that cause may be.

 

I've found this point easiest to explain by analogy to professional sports. To argue that Darwinian selection is tautological is like arguing that the NFL is tautological, because the best team wins, but 'best team' only means 'the team that wins'. But a game of football does not consist of the two coaches meeting in the middle of the field and comparing their teams' amounts of winningness, to see whose number is larger. No, the team that wins always wins in some particular way. They run better, or throw better, or kick better, or something. Their being better means something particular about them, and not just the mere fact that they win. Exactly what it is that makes them better is just whatever makes them win. But it has to be some particular cause of winning, not just winning itself.

 

And so, in fact, you can clearly see evolution at work in professional football, over the decades. The whole game gradually changes, as winning tactics get adopted by all the teams, until counter-tactics are developed. It's all about winning, and nothing else, but that drives change.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

One of the subtlest arguments I know is the rebuttal of the old creationist complaint that natural selection is a tautology — that 'survival of the fittest' just means 'survival of the survivors'. In fact, natural selection very nearly is a tautology, and that's what makes it so inevitable. But it's not actually a tautology, and for a subtle but profound reason.

The point is that 'fitness' can be anything that makes for survival, but fitness also has to be something in particular, that makes for survival. It is not just an abstract quality of survivingness as such. Evolution is a theory about cause and effect, not just logical definition. It presumes that if an organism survives, it survives because of some cause. Fitness is not the survival itself, but the cause of survival — whatever that cause may be.

perhaps more to the point, whatever is selected for has to have a heritable element in order for selection to have an effect on the characteristics of a population. there's a reason why mendel gets such an important place in high school biology classes

[Randomizer]

This seems the appropriate topic for:

what shouldn't appear in research papers

[Alorael at Large]

Actually, evolution is fine with survival of the fittest sometimes being the survival of the survivors when they have no special qualifications except dumb luck. That's where genetic drift, random change in the allele frequency of a population, comes from. In an extreme enough case, it can become a genetic bottleneck with profound effects for the species, or at least that subpopulation of the species.

 

—Alorael, who has never encountered an argument against fitness or natural selection. Selection is both fairly intuitive and very well attested. In the lab, it's easy to watch one strain of bacteria outgrow another; in fact, scientists use selection techniques all the time as a tool to use bacteria as factories for DNA and proteins. Population changes due to changing selective pressures have been observed in larger animals, too: black peppered moths better surviving the industrial revolution are the textbook example, but even the Galapagos finches that Darwin observed have been observed since and fluctuations in local ecology lead to fluctuations in bird morphology.

[Goldengirl]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

And so, in fact, you can clearly see evolution at work in professional football, over the decades. The whole game gradually changes, as winning tactics get adopted by all the teams, until counter-tactics are developed. It's all about winning, and nothing else, but that drives change.

duh, winning

[Rowen]

If we added human sacrifice to the sport it would become very interesting indeed.